Author

Main Navigation

Category: Writing

Rejection slips are part of a writer’s landscape. All authors get them at one time or another, and they usually reflect the opinion of one particular reader — often an over-worked junior employee — on one particular day. You should never take them too seriously. Fortunately, all of the following authors persevered. If they hadn’t we may never have heard of them — or their best-selling books.

Can you identify who, and in some cases, what book, got rejected?

This author finally landed a book deal after five years of continual rejections. Total sales of her books now exceed $2 billion. Only William Shakespeare has sold more books, and he had a 400 year head start.

The author’s agent received 12 rejections in a row. The 13th took it, but only after eight-year-old daughter of the company’s chairman asked for the rest after reading the first chapter. When submitting the second book, the author was told to get a proper job as there was no money in writing for children.

“I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” This controversial book was first published in France, to great acclaim. The English-speaking publishers who originally turned it down (one of whom is quoted above) went on to sell 50 million copies of it.

“Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.” This was one of the many rejection letters received by this author, but the doctor had the last laugh. He’s now the 9th best-selling fiction author of all time.

“The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.” One of 15 rejections before this book, originally titled “Het Achterhuis” and published in Dutch, found an English publisher – and sold 25 million copies.

“Our united opinion is entirely against the book. It is very long, and rather old-fashioned.” One of a number of rejections for this classic. It was finally published with a print run of 3,000 copies, but only 50 of them sold during the author’s lifetime.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently the author intends it to be funny.” Legend has it that part of this novel’s name came about after 21 other publishers had rejected it.

The Pomodoro Technique is a method of time-management many writers find useful. It was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980’s and takes its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Crillo originally used. (Pomodoro is Italian for “tomato”.)

You can use a timing app on your computer or cellphone, but Crillo recommends a mechanical timer – the type you twist and set – because the physical action of doing so helps you focus on the task. (And personally, I find the quiet tick-tick-tick in the background a subtle prompt to keep going.)

A pomodoro is 25 minutes. It is absolutely indivisible! There’s not such thing as a half-pomodoro or three-fifths of one. If you don’t complete a pomodoro, it’s just not counted.

Here’s how to “pomodoro”:

Decide on a task; writing, revising, editing, etc.

Set the timer for 25 minutes.

Work on the task until the timer rings.

When it rings, put a tick on the piece of paper.

If you have fewer than four ticks on the page, take a five-minute break then go back to step 2.

If you’ve accumulated four ticks, put a line through them to cancel them out and take a 15-20 minute break. When you return, go back to step 1.

The advantage of working this way is that it breaks time up into manageable units and helps you keep focused. (“No, I won’t check my email till the timer rings.”) What’s more, the pomodoros don’t have to be contiguous. I know of one writer who makes her four-a-day by doing two in the morning before work, one at lunchtime, and one in the evening. Writer Kat Loterzo even credits it with helping her draft a book in just three weeks.

There are plenty of reasons fornotwriting, but surely you can fit in a pomodoro or two…?

“The dog is mentioned in the Bible 18 times — the cat not even once.”
–W E Farbstein, on the Old Testament

… so I thought I’d check it out with a quick free download from Project Gutenberg, and a text processing tool that’s built into Linux (called AWK, if you’re interested). I discovered that dogs actually get mentioned 41 times in the Bible. Here’s the breakdown:

Old Testament:

“dogs”

18

“dog”

14

New Testament:

“dogs”

8

“dog”

1

But Farbstein is right about cats; not a single mention. There’s a lot of cattle (153) and even nine caterpillars, but no cats.

The quote seems to suggest that this is a good thing — for dogs — but the unsavoury context of many of the mentions I found led me to investigate further. Here’s what Wikipedia’s List of Animals in the Bible says about the subject:

Dog — The dog in the East does not enjoy the companionship and friendship of man as in the western countries. Its instinct has been cultivated only insofar as the protecting of the flocks and camps against wild animals is concerned. In the towns and villages it roams in the streets and places, of which it is the ordinary scavenger; packs of dogs in a half-wild state are met with in the cities and are not infrequently dangerous for men. For this reason the dog has always been, and is still looked upon with loathing and aversion, as filthy and unclean. With a very few exceptions, whenever the dog is spoken of in the Bible (where it is mentioned over 40 times), it is with contempt, to remark either its voracious instincts, or its fierceness, or its loathsomeness; it was regarded as the emblem of lust, and of uncleanness in general. As some Muslims, to the present day, term Christians “dogs”, so did the Jews of old apply that infamous name to Gentiles. A greyhound is mentioned in Proverbs 30:31.

Dogs in the Bible were not well loved. To be called a dog was to be associated with evil and low status.
There is evidence in the Bible that physical violence toward dogs was considered acceptable (1 Samuel 17:43; Proverbs 26:17). To compare a human to a dog or to call them a dog was to imply that they were of very low status (2 Kings 8:13; Exodus 22:31; Deuteronomy 23:18; 2 Samuel 3:8; Proverbs 26:11; Ecclesiastes 9:4; 2 Samuel 9:8; 1 Samuel 24:14). In the New Testament, calling a human a dog meant that the person was considered evil (Philemon 3:2; Revelation 22:15).

So mention of dogs in the Bible isn’t a positive thing at all. In fact, it’s quite the reverse!

The problem: You’re looking at it!

In some ways, computers with word processors are the best writing invention ever. Until quite recently, writers wrote by hand. Imagine War and Peace, written out in longhand. Or A Tale of Two Cities. (You can still see some of Dickens’ original drafts and corrections here.) Now imagine being the printer, setting out each line of type, letter by letter, while trying to read some barely decipherable scrawl …

A lot later, typewriters came along, which simplified the process to a degree. The scratching of a nib was replaced by a mechanical clackety-clack and the end of each line was prefaced by warning bell, at which point the writer hit a lever to advance the paper a few millimetres and physically throw the carriage back to its starting point. (The origin, by the way, of that obtuse term Carriage Return.)

There were still problems with typewriters. Making corrections was awkward. So was making copies. In the days before photocopiers, carbon paper was the only way to go; tissue-thin stuff that you interleaved between your pages. If you struck each key firmly enough, you could get three or even four copies simultaneously, although readability disappeared rapidly with depth and just handling the stuff left you looking like you’d been fingerprinted by the police.

Word processors emerged in the 1960s as an offshoot of the computer revolution. (The term “word processing” was one of the New York Times buzz words of 1971.) They really were a revolution. You could cut and paste paragraphs without a glue pot, move things around without having to renumber all your pages, and even search and replace text. What’s more, you always had a copy on file and could print out a pristine draft (on your dot-matrix printer) any time you liked.

There were still problems though. Screens were green and the only character set on them was monospace. While a whole range of fancy printout formats were available, before graphical user interfaces and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) displays, you had to add strings of arcane control characters to layouts, and the only way to check you had exactly what you wanted was to actually print the document.

In the early ‘90s, I was the project manager responsible for putting PCs in the Wellington City Council. We had a budget of just under a million dollars, and after we’d selected a vendor, set up the servers and sorted out an implementation and training regime, we selected a pilot group to see how things would go in real life. We chose the council secretaries, a dozen or so women who did all the typing (as it was called in those days) for senior managers and councillors. They were no slouches when it came to word processing. They’d been using 80-character wide DEC terminals for years – along with all those arcane character codes – but were new to GUI interfaces.

I sat at the back of the classroom, observing, while one of the trainers introduced them to Word, a screen image beamed on to a whiteboard so they could all see it in action. They were clearly impressed. Then one of them asked, ‘What about doing columns?’

‘No problem,’ the trainer said. ‘Just select some text, click here, click there and choose the number of columns you want.’

In an instant the text reformatted into three perfect columns and there were gasps of astonishment around the room. It was the first time I’d seen people left speechless by the way technology can turn a complex task into a trivial one.

And that pretty much brings us up to date. There have been some modest improvements since the first GUI word processors, and I really wouldn’t be without one, but the problem for writers is that computer word I mentioned earlier. They’re just another program on your computer, one of many, probably running simultaneously. If Dickens or Dostoevsky wanted to check the latest news or tomorrow’s weather, they’d have to send out for a copy of the newspaper. All we have to do is flick to another window. Easy. And horribly distracting!

Have you ever walked into a room intent on doing something, then forgotten what it was when you got there? It’s a common experience and apparently has an evolutionary explanation. To our brains, changing rooms is equivalent to a sudden change in our environment and it causes our attention to be reset. Are there any threats here? Food sources? Friends or foes? Our previous mental state is overridden – at least temporarily.

Now consider research dating back as far as 1927 that shows humans are rubbish at multi-tasking. Each time you swap tasks on your computer, your brain does a mini reset. Each reset might only take a fraction of a second, but it can add up to 40% loss of efficiency. At that’s just mundane office tasks, not the peculiar focus and concentration that creative writing seems to demand.

People who claim to be good at multi-tasking are really just fooling themselves. All they’re actually doing is several things at once, poorly.

Think about that next time your email program pings to say you’ve got a message or you flip over to check Facebook or text messages on your phone.

The solution: You know this already

Yep, it’s simple: shut it down or turn it off.

If you want to send and receive emails, fine, do that. Browse the web? Go right ahead. Play a quick game of Solitaire? No problem. But if you want to write, properly and well, shut everything off but your word processor. Hell, even disconnect from the internet if really can’t trust yourself not to take a peek at Twitter or Facebook. And shut off your mobile phone too. If you’re really so important that you absolutely have to be available 24/7, you should probably focus on that role and come back to writing later.

Seriously, will the world stop turning if you can’t be reached for an hour?

And shut off your word processor’s built-in distractions too – its grammar and its spell checker. You can do all that stuff later. It’s not writing! Get your story out first in all its rough glory. Only writing is writing.

But I see this all the time – hell, I do it myself! My brain goes, Would Victorians have used the term pickpocket? Look it up. It won’t take a second. So I do. Online Etymology shows the word dates back to the 1590s, became a verb in the 1670s, and was had its origins in the term “pick-purse” from the late fourteenth century. Fascinating stuff, but it’s not actually writing.

Remember, only writing is writing.

Now shut off your browser and get back to work!

I wrote the first draft of this novel in six weeks, starting from a blank screen. (Here’s where I’d got to after 30 days.) It was rough and needed a lot more work, but that was so much easier once I had the thing in front of me.

It’s Monday morning, you had a great weekend, but you’re a bit tired. You call your boss and say you won’t be in today.

‘Oh, why not?’ she asks.

‘I just don’t feel like it.’

‘Fair enough. Well, I hope you’ll feel like coming in again soon. Your job will always be here for when you do feel like,’ she says.

A likely scenario, right? How about this one …?

You arrive home from a grinding day at work, knowing you should put an hour in at the keyboard working on The Novel, but you just don’t feel like it. So you don’t.

That’s much more likely, yes? And chances are, you’ll tell yourself you’ll make it up tomorrow (which you won’t), or do a long stretch at the weekend when you’ll really feel like writing (which you most certainly won’t because it’s the weekend).

So what’s going on here?

The fact is, we often do things we don’t feel like doing, yet we do them anyway. Did you really feel like going into work today? (Really?) Do you really feel like going grocery shopping? Or going to the dentist?

How about brushing your teeth? This is a great analogy because it’s something we all do at least twice a day, but give very little thought to. We just do it. And that’s the state you want to get to with your writing. No excuses, not even any real forethought; you just sit down and do it.

“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.” Isabelle Allende

The weird thing about writing – and I experience this almost every day – is that it takes 5-10 minutes for my brain to properly engage with whatever I’m working on. In that start-up time, it’s highly suggestible to doing anything that’s not writing. Another cup of tea. Checking email. Putting on the laundry. Even going out grocery shopping. But if I persist, it’s like it finally gives up and goes, “All right, damn it. If you insist …” and I’m away.

“… a writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

E.B. White

I’ve lost count of the number of times this has happened. In fact, I’ve come to welcome those not-feeling-like-writing times because they often turn out to be my most productive. At the end of an allocated hour, I’ll invariably carry on, sometimes way longer than planned, and finally have to tear myself away – which is also good because I’ll be keen to get back to it tomorrow.

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

Octavia Butler

Believe it or not, I didn’t actually feel like writing this blog today. But I did it anyway.

Like they say in the shoe ad …

This excuse not good enough for you? You might care for some other Reasons For Not Writing, here, here and here.

This reason’s a variation of Reason #2 (endlessly rewriting), but it’s a little more subtle.

By never quite finishing, you’re never in the invidious position of having a finished manuscript that you, or anyone else, can sit down and read and coolly assess. In some ways, finishing a manuscript is like a death in the family — or a lot of little deaths. You and your characters have spent a great deal of time together, you know each other intimately, you’re old friends — and now you have to say goodbye. What’s more, once they’re sent out into the world, your friends might be misjudged, disliked, even criticised. Better to keep them close where you can keep reliving and refining those lovely moments you’ve shared …

Here’s the solution

Get over yourself!

Finish up, type THE END, print it out, shove it in a drawer and start on something fresh. In a month or two’s time — when you’re well on the way to making new friends — take it out, settle in a quiet corner and read it through. At this point, you’ll almost certainly find a thousand little niggles that need unniggling, missing bits that need adding, fat that needs trimming and even whole segments that need re-ordering. Congratulations! This is the second part of being a writer: critically assessing your own work.

You might even decide it’ll take too much effort to fix. Fine. Put it down as a practice novel. Learn what you can from it and move on. Do you think Michelangelo carved David from a block of stone without spending years chipping away at countless other blocks, refining his technique? The mistakes ended up being turned into gravel paths while David ended up in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well.
This usually begins by reading good writing by other people,
and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time.

What do you mean by “writing”? It’s a serious question. Think about it for a moment.

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours “writing”. (Notice the inverted commas.) In fact, I was actually rewriting – going over some stuff I’d done the day before, tightening it, improving it, adding a little here, pruning a little there. At the end of a two-hour session, the book that it will be a part of was the grand total of 179 words longer.

In the old days – which is to say, up until a few of months ago – I’d have called that “writing”. After all, isn’t it still part of the general process of creating fiction? Yes, it can be. But it can also be a fantastic excuse NOT TO WRITE.

These days, I take a more pragmatic approach to writing. (Notice the absence of inverted commas.) These days, what I call writing is simply the production of new words that move the story on.

Oh, they may do so indirectly. May, in fact, be integral to your production of that story, but they are not writing!

For years, I’ve done all of the above – and more – and told myself I’m writing. Complete BS, of course. ‘Oh, I’m cruising the internet looking at common grammatical errors. It’s bound to help my work.’ Yeah, right!

So after I’d dithered and fussed and prettified yesterday, I realised I hadn’t actually written anything. I’m currently in what I call book mode, which is to say churning out the first draft of a new novel. (“Churning” is an appropriate term and my first drafts don’t even get a number. I call them all Draft 0. But more about that in later posts.) When I’m in book mode, I aim to write 1,500 words a day, five days a week. Yesterday, clearly, I stuffed up.

What to do?

Simple, actually. I reset my daily target, shut the fuck up, and got on with it. Here’s the result from the writing spreadsheet I keep:

In addition to the 179 extra words from the rewrite, I did another 1,564 words that day. My brain is slowly getting used to the idea that when I tell it I want 1,500 words, it’s simplest recourse is to comply.

(You might also notice I only managed 828 words on Monday, 15 August. Sometimes, external factors can’t be ignored, but I don’t let myself off. The following day I made up for it by writing more than two thousand words.)

The fact is that rewriting, editing and all the rest is a piece of cake compared to actually getting something down on paper. If writing was easy, everyone would do it. Instead, most people just talk about doing it. But as you now know, talking about writing isn’t writing either.

Try this

Books are read sequentially, but they don’t have to be written sequentially. If you’re stuck on a scene, move on somewhere else. You can always come back to it later.

Can’t remember a character detail or need to look something up on the net? Rather than break your flow, double-question mark the spot and carry on. (Eg. “Her blue?? eyes twinkled.”) Later, when you’re writing-but-not-writing, it’s easy to search out and correct all those double-question marks.

Consider taking part in Nanowrimo. It runs every November with the aim of writing 50,000 words in that month. That’s 1,667 words every day for 30 days. You can plot, outline and prepare beforehand, but November is really just about getting words on paper. It’s a tremendous challenge and requires a lot of discipline, but give it a shot. What’s the worse that could happen? You might fail and only write 40,000 words. Sheesh!

I have some bad news for you. If you want to write, no one is going to hand you a box of time. You’re going to have to make that time for yourself.

Here’s how …

Look at the numbers

Let’s break it down:

There are 168 hours in a week. You spend a third of them asleep (56 hours), which leaves 112 hours. If you’re working full-time, subtract 55 hours. (eight hours for work, plus one hour for lunch, plus one hour commuting to and one hour for commuting from work each day, five days a week)

That leaves 57 hours.

You’ve got to eat, of course. We’ve already accounted for five weekday lunches, so let’s add two more for weekends, plus seven days of lunches and breakfasts. Allow one hour for each. That’s another 16 hours.

(What, you only spend ten minutes on breakfast? Well, maybe you spend two hours preparing and eating dinner. Or maybe you get takeaways. These figures are only rough, I’m being general — and generous — here.)

But you also need to do shopping, chores, relax, unwind, chill out and socialise. Let’s allow another three whole hours a day for that: 21 hours a week …

That still leaves 20 hours a week – free!

Yep, you’re right. You have absolutely no time to write.

Comment

The fact is, the average Westerner spends 25-30 hours a week watching TV, plus another 10-15 on the internet.

(Interesting but irrelevant fact: a typical TV ‘hour’ is really only 43 minutes. The rest is advertising. So the average person spends 7-8 hours watching ads each week.)

Try This

1: Keep a timesheet of how you spend your free time. Do it for a week. It doesn’t need to be down to the minute, just to the nearest quarter hour. Round up and down where necessary. But be honest. At the end of the week, total it up and see where your time goes. Most people are surprised/horrified.

2: Carve out a regular slot each day for writing. Aim for an hour and try to write 250 words in that time. (How much is 250 words? If you’ve got this far, you’ve just read about 350 words.)

250 words may sound a lot, but it’s only a whisker over four words a minute. That’s one word every 15 seconds. You can do that, surely? (Try speaking at the rate of one word every 15 seconds. Sheesh!)

And if you can’t do a full hour in a single sitting, break it down. Aim for 130 words in 30 minutes, 65 words in 15 minutes, or even 20 words in 5 minutes. Why? Because it’ll soon start to add up. Check out the maths …

250 words x 5 days a week = 1,250 words a week

1,250 words x 52 weeks = 65,000 words in a year

The average novella is 30-40,000 words. The average novel is 60-80,000 words. That’s two novellas or one novel in a year. In less time than you now spend watching ads on TV.

Publish. A Lot: For those of you who have spent 10 years writing your last book I have news for you. You have ten days to write your next one. Okay, I’m sort of kidding with the ten days but, candidly, the most successful authors are pushing out tons of content: meaning books, not blog posts. In most categories, readers are hungry for new reads, new books, and willing to discover new authors. You’ll have a better time getting found if you continually push new books out there. How many should you do? At a recent writers conference some authors said they publish four books a year.